#12: No power profiles. This is a small one, but annoying. When my iPod Touch is connected, as in recieving power from somewhere, I’d like it to stay on and un-autolocked. When it’s not, I’d like the autolock to kick in after about a minute. Laptops and netbooks usually have “power management profiles” of some sort. Why not the Touch?
Told you it was a small one.
#10. No shared file area, no file system access. Seriously, Apple, wtf? I know you want us to believe noone needs to access or use the computer’s actual file system anymore, instead you want us to rely on indexing and tagging, and flat motherfucking file structures. Like your hog, Itunes.
Anyways, I’m not ready to go back to your “golden days” of the Macintosh File System. Just so you get what I’m trying to say here, the MFS was Apple’s first file system, used in early Mac OS. It was non-hierarchal, or rather, it supported exactly one level of folders. This is how they want us to treat our computers in 2009: By crippling them, going back to 1984 – which, you know, is kind of fitting given that year’s political connotations. Combined with #5 (No Multitasking), which of course was a stand-out feature of good old Windows 1, 2 and 3.x… Well, it seems Apple are tryint to drag us into the future facing ass-backwards. Seriously, you fucks!
So… Why is the lack of common file area and file system access a bad thing? Well… Let’s say I find a PDF on the web. I can view it kind of OK in Safari – but I can’t save it. If I’m offline, I can’t access the file. Can I download it? Nope. Why? Because I have no file system access. Can I view the same PDF with another PDF viewer, one with a bit more bells and whistles? Nope. I can’t access the files created or used by one app in another app. If I’ve loaded a PDF into the iPod Touch by using Folders, I can’t access that file from PDF Expert. There’s no shared file area. Each piece of software has access to its own little private area, and that’s it.
And sorry, Apple, but that just fucking sucks. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it sucks wet, hairy donkeyballs.
But of course, as we all know, freedom is slavery.
#11. Bluetooth limited. OK, when 3.0 came out, people discovered the iPod Touch has bluetooth. Big whoop, since you can’t do much with it. It has A2DP support (audio sending, for instance sending music to bluetooth enabled speakers), AVRC (for using it as a remote), and PAN (Personal Area Networking). No support for wireless headets, no support for stuff like keyboards etc. Once again, Apple limits the appeal of their product by forcing all users to accept arbitrary limits.
What Apple have here, is possibly the greatest, sweetest machine I’ve come across – aside from battery life and temperature resistance, obviously – and they’ve ruined 90% of its potential by making up bullshit limitations that just makes the machine fail to live up to its full potential. The iPod Touch is a cripple, pure and simple – and the problem is APple’s software, not the hardware.
I recently got myself an iPod Touch. Not to play music, mind you – my Nokia does that at a lower cost in battery. NO, I got a Touch for the apps. However, the process of using, handling, installing stuff on the Touch has left me less than happy.
So, this is me complaining:
#1. Locked into iTunes. I fucking HATE lock-in crap. Even if iTunes had been a competent piece of software and available in Linux, I’d still hate it. Why? Because there’s no choice. If you got an iPod Touch, you use iTunes. Period. regardless of wether or not iTunes actually does what you want it to…
#2. Itunes for Windows is crap. It’s slow, cumbersom, bloated as hell. Can’t speak for the Mac version, haven’t tried it, but this is just simply crap. It crashes as soon as you try to do more than one thing at a time (feels like Goddamn windows 3.1), it hangs, it behaves badly in virtually every way I can imagine it to. Expect more on this.
#3. Restricted development. As a software developer, I like tinkering with stuff. Unfortunately, I’ll need a Mac to develop for the iPod Touch/Iphone, since Apple are monopolistic assholes. Seriously.
#4. Restricted streaming. You can stream music from one iTunes to another – but not to a Touch or Iphone. Why? No good reason whatsoever. In fact, no reason whatsoever, good or otherwise. You need third-party software (like SimplifyMedia, which eats up 10% of the CPU – WHEN FUCKING IDLE). And also, there’s no way to sync libraries – you can’t for instance, have a music-serving server and then use a client computer to put that music on your iPhone. Apple are the kings of mindless, arbitrary restrictions.
#5. No multitasking. Despite having arguably the best kernel in the world for multitasking, especially when considering the machine’s size, there’s no multitasking. One app at a time, that’s the rule. Once again, we’re back in fucking Win3.1-ville.
#6. No scripting or programming languages on the machine itself. No python, basic, OPL, c++, java or whatever – nothing. They claim security and stability; that obviously wasn’t a concern when they built iTunes (se #2).
#7. No Flash. Seriously, they’re trying to market this thing as a mobile surfing device, yet have no support for Flash? Once again, arbitrary restrictions.
#8. Extremely bad support for multiple computers. Noone at Apple considers it possibly that one person might have more than one computer or, indeed, more than one OS on a single computer. So; there’s no way to share iTunes library, for instance. And if you have a Touch, with a lot of apps on it, and try to sync it with a secondary system – even if that system has exactly the same apps thet are on the Touch in question – it scrambles the order of those apps when Syncing. As in, I got X, Y and Z on my touch. I’ve carefully ordered them as Z, Y and X. I got a PC with X, Y and Z. I sync. Now, the order is Y, Z, X. Marvellous.
#9. No selective backup. I can’t choose to make a backup of only the data for one or two apps – backup is all or nothing, with absolutely NO way to check what made it into the backup and what didn’t.
I still use the machine, and I still kind of like it. But there are just enough crap to have to deal with on a daily basis to keep me from becoming a real advocate.
Expect this list to grow.
I just bought the game Space Empires IV from Strategy First/Digital River. I am not happy. Why?
1. The installation process. First I had to download a worthless piece of ass-garbage “downloader”. Which, of course, didn’t work in Linux. It downloaded a 196 mb installation file. That installation file extracted another 196 mb installation file into a temporary directory, and launched it. And that file, finally, was runnable in Linux and seems to have worked OK. I mean, c’mon! Downloaders? Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on.
2. The license. I had forgotten how ridiculously silly licence agreements were. More to the point, I’d forgotten a single purchase just allowed me to install the game on one computer – regardless of wether or not any of the computers I want to install and run the game on are ever used by anyone but me. One purchase, one installation. Got it. So, if I want to be able to play both on my main comp and my tiny EEE netbook, I get to shelf out twice as much. Gee, I never did have this problem with the old DOS games…
3. The anti-piracy crap that’s enforcing the license. Of course, copy protections have always been, well, kind of crap – but this got me genuinely pissed. Why? Well, because I paid for this fucking game, and because I still can’t fucking play it. “Key has expired”, it moans, and wants me to contact support with some “hardware key”. OK, so if I want to run the game on one computer, but both in the real OS and a virtualized OS, I also need to get another license? FUCK YOU.
I mean, this game is GREAT. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s AWESOME, provided you like 4x games (you know, slow-paced turn-based strategy games in space…). But it’s just not fucking worth it. I know boycotting is a blunt and stupid tool, but in this case, the ONLY way for me to enjoy this game – even within the realm of the license – is piracy.
This is fucking intolerable. Anti-piracy crap ONLY punishes the customer, NEVER the pirates.
Let no man tell you that Apple isn’t evil. Apple is every bit as monopolistic and fucking-bastardly as Microsoft – and this Quicktime shenanegans is just the last part of a long saga. Remember when installing or updating Quicktime suddenly automagically meant also installing their crappy webbrowser Safari in windows? Yeah. Remember how Itunes, until enough of us complained, was riddled with DRM? Yeah.
Tried watching Apple Trailers on Linux?
Yeah.
So… Got myself a 360 (Arcade, HDMI) a few weeks back. A neat little package. It’ll probably be the second console I won’t chip or crack in any way, unless I can be absolutely certain it won’t affect Live functionality. I don’t care much for playing against others, you see, but I am certainly an Achievement whore. Always been, really. I collect things and try to make my collections complete, it’s what I do.
(The only other console I won’t crack is my Gamecube, but that’s because the cost of cracking it is about the same cost as purchasing the only game I actually want for it – Metal gear Solid: Twin Snakes.)
Anyways, since I’m me, I’ve been fiddling around with the 360, trying to get as much usefulness out of it as humanly possible. First thing I noticed was that there, apparently, is no way whatsoever to stream video from an Ubuntu ur Linux system to the 360. We can’t have that, can we? I considered booting into Windows 7 every time I wanted to watch something, but I didn’t want to install a bunch of crapware on my shiny new W7 install just to test some stuff – and also, rebooting is a pain in the ass.
So: Virtual Machinery, then. I already had a fully working Windows XP virtual machine in VirtualBox, so I decided to try and use that. There are multiple advantages to thisd approach, such as the ability to just delete the virtual machine and create a new one if stuff go to hell, and not needing to reboot the computer – but there’s one major disadvantage: It demands a lot of raw system power. I’m using a Dual-Core 2.8 ghz 64-bit processor with 4 gigs of RAM (with 2 gigs usable by the virtual machine), and this is apparently enough. Just saying, if you got a smaller rig, YMMV etc.
What I did:
Advantages and disadvantages over using XBMC on the old X-box:
The major advantage is processing power; the X-box is rather limited and cannot reliably and smoothly show hi-def content.
The disadvantages are many: Slower to respond since TVersity must transcode everything into a format the 360 understands, no correction of broken subs (i frequently need to use subtitle delays etc), my main comp needs to be turned on, the virtual machine started, and TVersity up and running and the computer can’t do much else at the same time. Also, I’ve only been able to get TVersity to recognise my server’s network shares with some ugly workarounds (mounting them first in Ubuntu and then as VirtualBox shared folders…)
I think I’ll stick to my X-box and XBMC for most of my media needs for now – but I’ll probably watch my any content available in Hi-Def on my 360 via TVersity. The difference in quality is enough to motivate the continued existence of my TVersity server. Besides, it’s a fun project.
First of all, I’m overall impressed. Much more so than I ever was with Vista. This is truly the XP to Vista’s ME. That being said, of course the sun still has spots, and Windows 7 is so far far from free of fault.
How many times have you written something in the wrong case? Not just IN CAPS because you happened to touch the much-maligned Caps Lock button, but sometimes you just slip on the Shift button – and sometimes you need to deal with stuff other people have written.
How about this:
When no text is selected, the Caps Lock button works normally. Or it’s set to do nothing, whatever. Noone uses the damn thing anymore anyway.
BUT, when text is selected, each press of the button cycles the selected text in some user-defined fashion. The simplest config would be just CAPS->nocaps (and then back to CAPS). Slightly more sofisticated: CAPS->Sentence->nocaps… Or whatever.
So, for instance, if I selected the following text:
OMG FFS LAME A$$ NOOOOOOOBS
And pressed “Caps Lock”, then it would become:
omg ffs lame a$$ noooooobs
“Sentence case” sould of course be able to simply use periods, question marks etc to see where one sentence ended and another began.
All I need is to find a way to get a Python program to run in the background, take over Caps’ functionality, and manipulate selected text. Heh.
Seriously, this is getting old. I just want to find a good player and stick with it. Am I having too high standards? Am I just being picky?
…No. I don’t think it is in any way extraordinary to be able to have multiple watch folders in a music player. Or having the ability to, in a simple way, transfer my music to my mp3 player. Or use multiple genres in my tags.
Songbird, latest version. Looks extremely good, and feels good, too. This GUI I could get used to. But, it won’t find my mp3 player, it doesn’t understand multiple genre tags and it has only one watch folder (even though the config says “Watch folders”, which brings some hope for the future). Other than that, I’m actually kind of impressed that the buggy piece of shit I tested a few months back has actually come this far. It’s even not too shabby starting up, taking only a little more time than Foobar through Wine, which is still my player of choice. That might change, though, and Songbird is currently my top contender. I’ll spend some time tweaking it, seeing if I can somehow make it recognize my mp3 and check the forums to see if there are any plans for real genre support… Might even experiment with multiple genre fields in the id3v2-metadata. Now that would be freaky…
Anyways, color me impressed.
EDIT: Slightly less so, having discovered that Songbird indexes everything. Everything. Including files I just wanted to play one bloody time. Wish there was some way to make it stop…
In my neverending quest for the perfect audio player, I have once again come up empty. Exaile, Rhythmbox, Amarok, Banshee, Listen, Songbird – even Foobar, they all have their faults. So this is just a post about what I actually want. Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll find the perfect player – or build it.
User interface
The user interface should optimally be modular. Foobar2000 is a good model here. As much as possible should be rearrangeable, and the user should be able to choose which Ui components to show rather easily. Failing this, I want a playlist browser, a library browser, and a view of the current playlist. And a search box, which can search either in the library or in the current playlist.
The user interface elements should be clear and user-firendly. A minimum of clicks to accomplish each tasks.
The Library
The library should not be only at one location, but rather be a set of folders the user chooses. The library should index all tags, including language and CD# and multiple genres for each song.
When browsing the library, “The Beatles” should be sorted with the B’s rather than the T’s. I want a simple interface to sort or filter by genre, language, artist, year, album and finally track. Think Amarok but extended; not just genre-artist-track.
Playlists
There should be both regular playlists, the kind I manually add stuff to, and Smart playlists, which are basically saved searches. FontExplorerX has a nice interface for creating smart folders, I’d like to see something similar. Possibly all kinds of context menus for “save current search as smart folder” etc as well.
I’d like to export the playlists themselves as pls or m3u, as well as transfer the contents to a connected device (like mp3 players) according to predefined file system patterns which are remembered between sessions.
Speed & system resources
Starting the player should be lightning-quick. The library population function can run in a separate thread and may be slightly slower, and the library update function needs to be optimized and also run in a separate thread.
The player should, when running, use an absolute minimum of hardware resources.
Playing separate files
It should be possible to play an mp3 without adding it to the library.
Album Art
There should be support for multiple filenames for folders – i.e, the art should be found regardless of filename. Possibly the user could define his own filenames to be detected.
Conclusions
None of the players I’ve tried manage to get full points on all of these. Foobar2000 comes closest by far, but fails in filtering (only genre/artist/track), a slightly less-than-optimal UI (comes from being a windows program, I know) and smart playlists (there’s a plugin but it’s clunky as heck).
